Nakoda

The Nakoda, better known by the Ojibwe and Cree exonym Assiniboine, or Stone Sioux, are a Siouan-speaking people of the northern plains. They broke away from the other Dakota peoples in the 1500s and were recorded as a separate nation by 1620, before Ojibwe groups armed by French traders pushed them onto the plains.

There they became mounted bison hunters whose power at its height stretched from the North Saskatchewan River to the Missouri. From the 1730s the Nakoda were the pillar of the Iron Confederacy with the Cree and Saulteaux, controlling the trade in guns, horses and pemmican.

They fought the Blackfoot Confederacy and their Dakota kin for the bison grounds, and smallpox epidemics in 1781 and 1837 badly thinned their camps. Their Alberta relatives, the Stoney, had become a distinct people by the mid-eighteenth century.